East Rock Park: Traprock, Regicides, and a City on the Ridge
Near New Haven, Connecticut
Rising about three hundred sixty feet above New Haven, East Rock is a slab of ancient dolerite, the dense, dark stone New Englanders call traprock, and it has been shaping this city's story since long before the city existed.
About two hundred million years ago, as the supercontinent Pangaea began tearing itself apart, molten rock surged upward through fissures in the sandstone bedrock. It cooled slowly underground, forming a mass far harder than the rock around it. Glaciers came and went over hundreds of millions of years, grinding away the softer sandstone while leaving the dolerite standing proud. What you see today is essentially the exposed root of an ancient lava intrusion, now draped in forest and rimmed by the city that grew in its shadow.
In sixteen sixty-one, two judges who had signed the death warrant of King Charles the First of England arrived in New Haven as fugitives. England's monarchy had been restored, and the men, Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe, faced execution if captured. New Haven's Puritan community hid them, and for a time the two men sheltered in a cave at West Rock just across the valley. They moved from sympathizer to sympathizer for years, and a trail across the valley on West Rock still bears the name the Regicides Trail in their memory. The whole episode illustrates just how far New Haven's founders were willing to defy the Crown to protect their own.
The park itself was designed in the eighteen seventies by Donald Grant Mitchell, who shaped the carriage roads and meadows into something between a pleasure ground and a viewpoint. At the summit, a granite shaft called the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument was completed in eighteen eighty-seven, honoring New Haven's dead from four wars. The eleven-foot bronze Angel of Peace at its top faces downtown with an olive branch outstretched, visible from much of the city below.
Today East Rock is four hundred twenty-seven acres of urban wilderness, with views stretching to Long Island Sound on a clear day. The geology alone makes it worth the climb: you are standing on the edge of a continental rift, a scar left in the earth the morning the Old World and the New World started pulling apart.
